In recent years, there is growing concern about depletion and environmental problems of limited oil resources due to an increase in unstable oil prices and a rapid change in climate. In order to solve this concern, there is an increase in demand for a variety of alternative techniques for breaking petrochemical-based chemical industry, and researches have been focused on obtaining various value-added compounds from microorganisms. Among the researches, a number of researches into production of diamine that is a nylon precursor and commercialization thereof are in progress.
Putrescine that is a diamine having four carbon lengths (Qian et al., Biotechnol. Bioeng. 104:651-662, 2009; Schneider et al., Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 95:169-178, 2012) and cadaverine that is a diamine having five carbon lengths (Qian et al., Biotechnol. Bioeng. 108:93-103, 2011; Mimitsuka et al., Biosci. Biotech. Bioch. 71:3295-2135, 2007; Kind et al., Metab. Eng. 25:113-123, 2014) were produced by using the microorganism until now. Further, even though it has not been reported to produce 1,6-diaminohexane that is a diamine having 6 carbon lengths, there is a patent in which metabolic pathways capable of producing 1,6-diaminohexane have been designed (US 2013/0303723 A1). As described above, the researches into production of diamines having several carbon lengths using the microorganisms and commercialization thereof are in progress, but it has not been reported to produce 1,3-diaminopropane that is a diamine having 3 carbon lengths in the microorganism until the present.
1,3-diaminopropane (1,3-DAP) is an industrially important chemical, and is widely used as a crosslinking agent for an epoxy resin, and is used as precursors of various pharmaceutical products, agricultural products and organic compounds. In particular, various nylons are able to be produced by polymerizing the 1,3-diaminopropane (1,3-DAP) with dicarboxylic acid (Cui et al., Polymer International 53:1729-1734, 2004; Cui et al., European polymer journal 40:1111-1118, 2004). The 1,3-diaminopropane is produced by a very small number of microorganisms (Tabor et al., Microbiol. Rev. 49:81-99, 1985), and Acinetobacter species bio-synthesizes the 1,3-diaminopropane using 2-ketoglutarate 4-aminotransferase (dat) that is an enzyme converting aspartate-4-semialdehyde (ASA) into 2,4-diaminobutanoate (DAB), and 2,4-diaminobutanoate decarboxylase (ddc) that is an enzyme converting 2,4-diaminobutanoate (DAB) into 1,3-diaminopropane. However, there is no report on detection of 1,3-diaminopropane in a medium outside the microorganism yet.
Therefore, the present inventors made an effort to develop a recombinant microorganism capable of producing 1,3-diaminopropane, and as a result, found that the recombinant microorganism expressing 2-ketoglutarate 4-aminotransferase and 2,4-diaminobutanoate decarboxylase derived from Acinetobacter baumannii could produce the 1,3-diaminopropane, and completed the present disclosure.